Hey Tea Party-Republicans: The Founders Are Not Your Guys
This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee longhouse.
As they wrap themselves in the Constitution they mean to shred, that is
the self-evident Truth the Tea/GOP Party ultimately cannot face.
Our legal godfathers---the ones Glenn Beck loves to conjure---were Deistic liberal humanists whose core beliefs he hates.
They dumped that tea because they despised the corporation that owned it
and the idea of empire it (and today's corporate-military right) stood
for.
The very first phrase of this nation's defining document, the Bill of Rights, says:
"Judaeo-Christian? Not a chance."
The grassroots farmers that made the Revolution were free-thinking hemp
growers. Their favorite scribe, Tom Paine, was the son of a Quaker
whose Age of Reason assaulted the church with unsurpassed fury. Today's
Tea/GOP would have it burned.
Our greatest genius, Ben Franklin, was a proud and joyous sexual
adventurer. His very presence today would induce howls of (envious)
outrage from the religious right.
It was Franklin who most loved Native America. He introduced himself to
the French as "an American savage." He stamped the Hodenosaunee
(Iroquois) gifts of personal freedom and a democratic confederation into
the soul of the new nation.
More formally, our tradition of direct voting, still alive in many New
England towns, where the Revolution was born, was conceived in Athens,
508 BC. The Republic ("if you can keep it," as Franklin warned) came
from Rome, 509 BC. Long before the "Christian Era."
The federal structure adopted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,
was---with Franklin's mentoring---based on the Iroquois Confederacy.
That union was born at latest 1540 AD. It sustained a functioning
democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in
existence.
The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and
communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as
abortion and homosexuality. Along with so many other lethal diseases,
Original Sin was an unwanted import.
It is the humanistic liberalism of America's Founders that STILL enrages
today's neo-Puritan Tea/GOP. The Jefferson they love to claim
fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty
years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived "alone" in the
White House.
He and Franklin and Madison and Paine had no time for the Christian
faith. It's by their intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in
the Constitution. Their liberal Deism said a Creator got the universe
going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will (and
inalienable rights), then left.
Franklin's disdain for church services spices his autobiography.
Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his
personal Bible. Paine's Age of Reason still enrages the official
church. Madison's First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official
religion. Unitarianism in all its liberal diversity was shared by
presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison
and Monroe.
Their system of checks and balances was based on the Socratic
proposition that with the freedom to dialog, human reason will prevail.
Thus the First Amendment's very first phrase exalts freedom from
Religion, ie separation of church and state, a phrase coined by
Jefferson, demanded by the new nation as a whole.
Like virtually all other American farmers, Washington and Jefferson
raised serious quantities of hemp, and made good money from it. Franklin
owned a paper mill that ran on it. All may well have smoked its
psycho-active cousin, now known as marijuana. If you told them the
nation they founded would make this versatile herb illegal, they would
laugh at you.
They'd be equally horrified to hear the Foxist Tea/GOP claiming them as icons in a sectarian crusade for repression and empire.
Today's religious right is an unholy fusion of theocratic
authoritarianism---which our Founders hated above all---and corporate
tyranny, whose tea they pitched in Boston harbor.
Along with George III, there's nothing they loathed more than the anti-human hypocrisy we hear from the Foxist Legion.
Likewise, Beck, Pailn, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and their ilk would have
shrieked with rage at the actual Franklin and Paine, Jefferson and
Madison, not to mention the populist farmers and sailors, workers and
women who fought and died for the Revolution we all Revere (yes, him
too!).
So next time those Tea/GOP phonies gaze off in the distance to claim
kinship with the Founders, remind everyone you know who really did win
that Revolution and write that Bill of Rights.
Those hemp-growing, tree-hugging, corporate-hating deistic free loving
and free thinking present-at-the-creation Americans believed above all
that the Truth would keep us free.
Now more than ever, it's our patriotic duty to prove them right.
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee longhouse.
As they wrap themselves in the Constitution they mean to shred, that is
the self-evident Truth the Tea/GOP Party ultimately cannot face.
Our legal godfathers---the ones Glenn Beck loves to conjure---were Deistic liberal humanists whose core beliefs he hates.
They dumped that tea because they despised the corporation that owned it
and the idea of empire it (and today's corporate-military right) stood
for.
The very first phrase of this nation's defining document, the Bill of Rights, says:
"Judaeo-Christian? Not a chance."
The grassroots farmers that made the Revolution were free-thinking hemp
growers. Their favorite scribe, Tom Paine, was the son of a Quaker
whose Age of Reason assaulted the church with unsurpassed fury. Today's
Tea/GOP would have it burned.
Our greatest genius, Ben Franklin, was a proud and joyous sexual
adventurer. His very presence today would induce howls of (envious)
outrage from the religious right.
It was Franklin who most loved Native America. He introduced himself to
the French as "an American savage." He stamped the Hodenosaunee
(Iroquois) gifts of personal freedom and a democratic confederation into
the soul of the new nation.
More formally, our tradition of direct voting, still alive in many New
England towns, where the Revolution was born, was conceived in Athens,
508 BC. The Republic ("if you can keep it," as Franklin warned) came
from Rome, 509 BC. Long before the "Christian Era."
The federal structure adopted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,
was---with Franklin's mentoring---based on the Iroquois Confederacy.
That union was born at latest 1540 AD. It sustained a functioning
democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in
existence.
The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and
communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as
abortion and homosexuality. Along with so many other lethal diseases,
Original Sin was an unwanted import.
It is the humanistic liberalism of America's Founders that STILL enrages
today's neo-Puritan Tea/GOP. The Jefferson they love to claim
fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty
years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived "alone" in the
White House.
He and Franklin and Madison and Paine had no time for the Christian
faith. It's by their intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in
the Constitution. Their liberal Deism said a Creator got the universe
going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will (and
inalienable rights), then left.
Franklin's disdain for church services spices his autobiography.
Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his
personal Bible. Paine's Age of Reason still enrages the official
church. Madison's First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official
religion. Unitarianism in all its liberal diversity was shared by
presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison
and Monroe.
Their system of checks and balances was based on the Socratic
proposition that with the freedom to dialog, human reason will prevail.
Thus the First Amendment's very first phrase exalts freedom from
Religion, ie separation of church and state, a phrase coined by
Jefferson, demanded by the new nation as a whole.
Like virtually all other American farmers, Washington and Jefferson
raised serious quantities of hemp, and made good money from it. Franklin
owned a paper mill that ran on it. All may well have smoked its
psycho-active cousin, now known as marijuana. If you told them the
nation they founded would make this versatile herb illegal, they would
laugh at you.
They'd be equally horrified to hear the Foxist Tea/GOP claiming them as icons in a sectarian crusade for repression and empire.
Today's religious right is an unholy fusion of theocratic
authoritarianism---which our Founders hated above all---and corporate
tyranny, whose tea they pitched in Boston harbor.
Along with George III, there's nothing they loathed more than the anti-human hypocrisy we hear from the Foxist Legion.
Likewise, Beck, Pailn, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and their ilk would have
shrieked with rage at the actual Franklin and Paine, Jefferson and
Madison, not to mention the populist farmers and sailors, workers and
women who fought and died for the Revolution we all Revere (yes, him
too!).
So next time those Tea/GOP phonies gaze off in the distance to claim
kinship with the Founders, remind everyone you know who really did win
that Revolution and write that Bill of Rights.
Those hemp-growing, tree-hugging, corporate-hating deistic free loving
and free thinking present-at-the-creation Americans believed above all
that the Truth would keep us free.
Now more than ever, it's our patriotic duty to prove them right.
This is a Greco-Roman nation, gathered in a Hodenosaunee longhouse.
As they wrap themselves in the Constitution they mean to shred, that is
the self-evident Truth the Tea/GOP Party ultimately cannot face.
Our legal godfathers---the ones Glenn Beck loves to conjure---were Deistic liberal humanists whose core beliefs he hates.
They dumped that tea because they despised the corporation that owned it
and the idea of empire it (and today's corporate-military right) stood
for.
The very first phrase of this nation's defining document, the Bill of Rights, says:
"Judaeo-Christian? Not a chance."
The grassroots farmers that made the Revolution were free-thinking hemp
growers. Their favorite scribe, Tom Paine, was the son of a Quaker
whose Age of Reason assaulted the church with unsurpassed fury. Today's
Tea/GOP would have it burned.
Our greatest genius, Ben Franklin, was a proud and joyous sexual
adventurer. His very presence today would induce howls of (envious)
outrage from the religious right.
It was Franklin who most loved Native America. He introduced himself to
the French as "an American savage." He stamped the Hodenosaunee
(Iroquois) gifts of personal freedom and a democratic confederation into
the soul of the new nation.
More formally, our tradition of direct voting, still alive in many New
England towns, where the Revolution was born, was conceived in Athens,
508 BC. The Republic ("if you can keep it," as Franklin warned) came
from Rome, 509 BC. Long before the "Christian Era."
The federal structure adopted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,
was---with Franklin's mentoring---based on the Iroquois Confederacy.
That union was born at latest 1540 AD. It sustained a functioning
democracy for at least 250 years, still longer than the US has been in
existence.
The matriarchal Hodenosaunee were defined by a love of nature and
communal land stewardship. Open dialog was as easily accepted as
abortion and homosexuality. Along with so many other lethal diseases,
Original Sin was an unwanted import.
It is the humanistic liberalism of America's Founders that STILL enrages
today's neo-Puritan Tea/GOP. The Jefferson they love to claim
fathered at least five children with his slave Sally Hemings, thirty
years his junior. Some were conceived while he lived "alone" in the
White House.
He and Franklin and Madison and Paine had no time for the Christian
faith. It's by their intelligent design that Jesus appears nowhere in
the Constitution. Their liberal Deism said a Creator got the universe
going, installed the laws of nature, endowed humans with free will (and
inalienable rights), then left.
Franklin's disdain for church services spices his autobiography.
Jefferson clipped all references to a divinity for Jesus out of his
personal Bible. Paine's Age of Reason still enrages the official
church. Madison's First Amendment enshrines disdain for an official
religion. Unitarianism in all its liberal diversity was shared by
presidents two through six, including two Adamses, Jefferson, Madison
and Monroe.
Their system of checks and balances was based on the Socratic
proposition that with the freedom to dialog, human reason will prevail.
Thus the First Amendment's very first phrase exalts freedom from
Religion, ie separation of church and state, a phrase coined by
Jefferson, demanded by the new nation as a whole.
Like virtually all other American farmers, Washington and Jefferson
raised serious quantities of hemp, and made good money from it. Franklin
owned a paper mill that ran on it. All may well have smoked its
psycho-active cousin, now known as marijuana. If you told them the
nation they founded would make this versatile herb illegal, they would
laugh at you.
They'd be equally horrified to hear the Foxist Tea/GOP claiming them as icons in a sectarian crusade for repression and empire.
Today's religious right is an unholy fusion of theocratic
authoritarianism---which our Founders hated above all---and corporate
tyranny, whose tea they pitched in Boston harbor.
Along with George III, there's nothing they loathed more than the anti-human hypocrisy we hear from the Foxist Legion.
Likewise, Beck, Pailn, Limbaugh, O'Reilly and their ilk would have
shrieked with rage at the actual Franklin and Paine, Jefferson and
Madison, not to mention the populist farmers and sailors, workers and
women who fought and died for the Revolution we all Revere (yes, him
too!).
So next time those Tea/GOP phonies gaze off in the distance to claim
kinship with the Founders, remind everyone you know who really did win
that Revolution and write that Bill of Rights.
Those hemp-growing, tree-hugging, corporate-hating deistic free loving
and free thinking present-at-the-creation Americans believed above all
that the Truth would keep us free.
Now more than ever, it's our patriotic duty to prove them right.

